How To Share Knowledge More Successfully?

All foundations, whether new to sharing or considerably experienced, have room to grow and refresh their practice to facilitate knowledge exchange. In a dynamic world where global politics can quickly shift social needs and opportunities, and where organizations must keep pace with expansions in technology, knowledge sharing itself benefits from openness to reflection and adaptation.

• Align knowledge development with others’ needs. Foundations that embrace knowledge sharing tend to view it as a mission-building strategy, and indeed, one purpose of sharing knowledge is to advance a foundation’s goals.
• Make knowledge easy to use. Foundations can create and disseminate knowledge, but to increase its value, it is worth considering how to make it easy for knowledge seekers to use.
• Invite diverse perspectives on emerging work. Increasingly, foundations are realizing they can more effectively address issues related to equity and community needs by helping to cultivate community champions. Some are using their platforms to lift community voices and broaden the diversity of perspectives in social change efforts.
• Share more failures. Although foundations possess many types of knowledge, the idea of sharing knowledge about failures and subsequent learning garners extra attention across the field. When foundations share true failures and how they have learned from them, the results can be highly rewarding.
• Be smart about communication modes. Keeping up with changes in how people gather knowledge and interact with technology is key to staying relevant and ensuring the transfer of knowledge to new audiences.